Chapter 98: Beneath the Surface
Late Afternoon
Location: East Forestline — 30 miles outside Southside Harbor
The first step beneath the canopy was not silent.
It was a moment that echoed — not with sound, but with recognition. The moss under Aria's boots seemed to recoil, then absorb her weight with reluctant acceptance. The air thickened. What should have been a warm afternoon deepened into a strange twilight, the sun barely cutting through the dense tangle of branches overhead. It wasn't just shadow. It was something else.
Alive.
The forest had changed.
Not gradually — instantly. As if it had been dormant until Aria crossed some unseen boundary, and now the dream had ended and the truth was waking.
Selene followed close behind, her footsteps deliberate, eyes scanning everything with practiced precision. Her rifle remained at her side, unraised but ready. She didn't speak, didn't have to. Every movement in her posture made it clear: she felt it too. The hush of watching things. The breath that wasn't wind. The wrongness hiding in the details.
"Tracks," Selene murmured, crouching beside a twisted root.
Aria moved closer, peering down. The prints were shallow, nearly invisible, as though something weightless had passed through. Not human. Not animal. Toes long and thin. Not clawed. Not booted. Just impressions. Echoes. Whatever it was, it hadn't wanted to be seen.
"Recently?" Aria asked.
"Hours, maybe less."
Aria nodded and looked up again. The forest breathed around them. Every branch, every crooked limb seemed to bend subtly in their direction.
She reached inward, brushing against the bloom.
It pulsed back immediately — no longer dormant, no longer content to wait. It was alert. Active. Whispering to her in color and scent, in texture and memory. She let the inner garden unfold behind her eyes. The garden was wider now, lusher, its vines coiling into complex patterns that shimmered and shifted in ways she didn't fully understand. At its center, the fountain still stood, its waters glowing faintly in hues she had no names for.
She could feel it: the garden knew this forest.
This is old ground, came the bloom's presence — not in words, but in a sudden rush of sensations. Burning roots. The smell of wet stone. Blood spilled across bark. A memory half-formed but urgent.
"Something happened here," Aria murmured aloud.
Selene stood. "I don't need the bloom to tell me that. This place feels wrong."
"No," Aria said softly, "not wrong. Remembering."
They pressed deeper.
The terrain changed as they walked — sometimes subtly, sometimes jarringly. Trees stood too close together, growing in unnatural spirals that seemed to repel light. In some places, the moss gave way to dry, cracked earth where nothing should have been able to grow. In others, soft ferns shivered without wind. The forest wasn't one place — it was many, layered and stitched together with seams only the bloom could trace.
They found remnants of old paths — weathered stones swallowed by roots, half - formed archways made from fused bone and bark, and signs of ancient camps: rusted lanterns, collapsed shelters overtaken by ivy.
"People lived here once," Selene muttered, kicking aside a skeletal framework of what might have been a cooking pot. "Long enough to build. Then left in a hurry."
"Or never left," Aria whispered.
Selene didn't respond.
The deeper they moved, the more Aria felt it in her chest — a pressure, like descending under deep water. The bloom pulsed in response, faster now. Her skin prickled with static, and the trees began to whisper louder — not audibly, not quite — but in the folding of air, the subtle cracking of old wood, the rise and fall of leaves that didn't match any natural wind.
They stopped at a clearing ringed with stones.
It wasn't large, maybe fifteen feet across, but it was unnervingly symmetrical. At the center was a pit — shallow, maybe two feet deep, filled with what looked like black glass. It didn't reflect the sky. Instead, it shimmered with an oily hue, like a surface stretched too tight over something trying to breathe.
Aria stepped closer.
Her feet stopped inches from the rim. Her reflection didn't look back. Instead, she saw movement — something shifting beneath the surface. A flicker of a face. Her own? No. Older. Darker. Eyes like coals.
She stumbled back.
Selene caught her before she hit the ground.
"What did you see?"
Aria's throat felt dry. "It's a memory pit."
"A what?"
Aria blinked. "I don't know how I know that."
She turned back to the glass, heart thudding. The bloom offered no words — only a slow curl of sensation: reverence. Fear. And a deep, deep knowing.
This was where it began.
Suddenly the world tilted.
Not physically. Internally. As if her mind had taken a step she hadn't meant to make. The ground around the pit pulsed once — barely noticeable. But she felt it in her spine. Then came the hum again — the same subterranean vibration from earlier. This time stronger.
And then — stillness. Thick. Absolute.
And then a voice, curling through the space like smoke.
"You should not be here."
It wasn't Selene. It wasn't human.
They both turned.
The woman stood at the edge of the clearing, between two trees that had not been there seconds ago. She was the same figure Aria had seen by the creek, but now closer. More defined. Taller. Her limbs too long. Her body too fluid. Her skin, like polished obsidian twisted with the texture of bark. Her face shimmered, always slightly out of focus — like a memory half - forgotten.
Aria's hand went to her blade, but the woman lifted one long finger.
"No."
That single word pinned her in place. Not through threat. Through certainty. Like the forest itself had willed it.
Selene raised her rifle. "Back away."
The figure tilted her head. "You bring metal to a place older than time. You bring war to what does not forget."
Aria stepped forward. "What are you?"
The woman's eyes turned toward her. Not glowing. Not dark. Just endless. "You know me. You carry what I once was."
Aria's breath caught.
The bloom surged inside her, blooming like a flower catching fire.
The entity. The thing within her. This was its echo. Or maybe its source. She wasn't sure.
"You were the first," Aria said, voice shaking.
"I was the door," the woman replied. "You are the key."
Selene glanced between them. "Aria — what is she saying?"
But Aria couldn't respond. Her mind was flooded now — memories not hers crashing through her consciousness. A life lived among these trees. A people who once spoke with the land instead of carving it. A garden that reached too far. A decision that opened something that could not be closed.
"You called it here," Aria whispered. "The bloom. The thing inside me."
The woman stepped forward. The trees shifted with her, as if following.
"I called nothing. I was the bloom, before it was a name. Before you gave it form."
Aria felt weak, like her body was trying to reject the understanding forming inside her.
"This place," she whispered, "it's part of me."
"No," the woman said, stepping closer still. "You are part of it."
The silence that followed was absolute.
Then Selene moved. She stepped between them, rifle pointed straight at the woman's heart — or where her heart should have been.
"I don't care what you are," Selene said, voice like ice. "You don't get to take her."
The woman stopped.
For the first time, something changed in her expression. A flicker — not of threat, but of recognition.
"You are the anchor," she said slowly, "the tether that keeps her from dissolving. You are necessary. For now."
Selene's stance didn't waver. "Try me."
The woman's smile was a wound.
Then, just as suddenly as she had appeared, she turned. The trees parted for her, bending back like reeds. She paused only once.
"Beneath," she said. "Beneath the glass. Beneath the green. Beneath the bones."
And then she was gone.
The forest exhaled, and Aria fell to her knees.
Her head spun. Her heart thundered. The bloom pulsed in wild rhythm, more alive than ever.
Selene knelt beside her, one hand on her shoulder. "Aria — what the hell was that?"
Aria looked at her, eyes wide. "She was me. Or… what I'll become. Or what I already am."
Selene shook her head. "No. You're you."
Aria reached for her pack with shaking hands. "We have to go deeper."
"Aria —"
"Beneath the glass. She said that for a reason."
Selene looked toward the pit, then back at Aria. "You're not going down there alone."
Aria nodded. "I wasn't planning to."
They stared at the black glass together.
And for the first time, Aria saw it not as a wound — but as a doorway.
Tomorrow, they would descend.
But tonight, the forest would dream with them.